Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 – Aiming for Greatness

The enthusiasm with which Namco Bandai is promoting Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is both commendable and bemusing in equal measure. The European distributor of City Interactive’s sniper sequel is promoting the title with vigour, but talk of how aspects of its game design, AI and arsenal ape that of the industry’s big guns is a tad over ambitious.

During a recent visit to Namco Bandai’s UK HQ, the likes of Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid and GoldenEye are all name-checked throughout a presentation of an early level set in the Philippines. There’s perhaps an element of canny marketing at work here: a vain hope that in mentioning Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 in the same breath as these exemplary titles, a certain amount of greatness might be inferred by association. However, based on a play-through of two levels of Ghost Warrior 2 it’s apparent that it is destined to fall far short of the high standard of its supposed influences. What’s more, such comparisons only serve to highlight all that Ghost Warrior 2 isn’t, rather focusing on what it is.

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What developer City Interactive actually appears to be attempting with Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is to position it as a solid, budget-priced shooter, whose first and most crucial goal is to improve on the fun but flawed original, Sniper: Ghost Warrior. This has resulted in an overhaul of the game engine, physics system and AI, along with the removal of the much maligned run and gun assault missions of the first game. That doesn’t mean that you’ll be spending all of your time crawling through the brush picking off the enemy with a high-calibre rifle, though. The urban levels, set in a war-torn Sarajevo, feature a mix of stealth and full-on close-quarter combat with silenced pistols and assault rifles. This is an attempt to lend tension to the slower, more considered sniping levels, but it would be interesting to see what a developer with the courage of its convictions could achieve through the development of a full-on sniper-sim.

An early level set in Philippines offers ample opportunity to showcase some of Ghost Warrior 2’s headline features. Two-in-one kills, long-distance takedowns and the chance to drop lone bad guys, surreptitiously, and have their corpse disappear out of sight for an undetected kill are all satisfying. However, there appears to be a tendency for it to turn into a duck-shoot, if one enemy goon spies what you’re doing, which prompts his buddies to pop in-and-out of cover like a fairground whack-a-mole. What the Philippines level does demonstrate to good effect is the visual improvements made possible by City Interactive’s work with CryEngine 3. As the sun glints off the water and dense foliage is pushed aside as you stalk through the foliage, it’s easy to get caught up in the aesthetics of the environment, especially when playing on a high-end PC.

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But no amount of graphical polish can hide linearity, and a subterranean cave system highlights this particularly well. Your spotter guides you, step by step, through an area teeming with guards, telling you when to stop, what path to take and when to make your move. This leads to the feeling of a fairground-style, on-rails ride as you’re guided to each new vantage point to overhear the conversations of guards or observe a particularly pretty waterfall. The one instance in which I disobey the spotter and forge ahead on my own, I run into three oncoming guards, two of whom promptly get stuck on the scenery and are unable to offer effective resistance.

The level culminates in your cover being unavoidably blown, resulting in an enforced shoot-out and the detonation of explosive charges that have a predictably chaotic effect on the stability of the underground passages. This results in a dash to the surface, guided every step of the way by the faithful spotter who tells you where to turn and even when to leap obstacles. Despite his desperate pleas that I hurry, I dawdle for a few moments near the exit only to find that the explosive charges have done little more than result in some screen-shake and copious particle effects – another insubstantial parlour trick.

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Despite the extra graphical grunt afforded by the CryEngine 3, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 cannot get by on superficial good looks alone. Its thrills are tightly engineered and, for the most part, the sniping action is satisfying, especially when played on hard difficulty and required to take account of distance and environmental factors. It should also be noted that while two sample levels cannot condemn a game to mediocrity, so close are we to the release date that they likely give a good indication of its overall quality.

City Interactive says it’s aiming for review scores that sit a couple of points higher than that achieved by the first Ghost Warrior title. Based on current evidence, it’s possible that it might squeeze out the extra quality required to achieve that. However, any hopes that Namco Bandai has of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 standing shoulder to shoulder with the great and the good of the industry are likely to be shot down in very pretty, authentically-rendered flames.

Stace Harman is a freelance contributor to IGN and is convinced that zombies will one day inherent the Earth. You can follow him on Twitter.